The debate over whether or not RISC OS should be open sourced took another turn this week when Peter Naulls argued that "certain parts" of the OS could be released under an open source licence. The State-side coder behind various ports including Firefox said this would ideally include "crucial parts that affect all users, even if they don't realise it, parts that can be created from scratch and made much better than the Acorn original, and parts which can managed by specific developers who already understand them well."

No, but opensourcing your product instead of letting it die and go to the silicon heaven, when your company goes bankcrupt, is a nice gesture. If you can't make money out of it, chances are no-one else can, but your existing customers/users won't be left in a void. They will at least have an _option_ to help themselves. Your company going bankcrupt (i.e. unable to keep its support agreements, among other things) would leave them in complete void.

Doing that would leave no one but the enthusiast to reverse engineer the system like what happened with BeOS (Wich BTW I discovered before FOSS and it was to late for me to get) I just hope that doesn't happen to RISC OS